Instead of your Life's Purpose (2021)
philosophyinhell.substack.com
philosophyinhell.substack.com
> For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
Notably, man’s search for meaning was 1946 iirc and postmodernism didn’t really ascend until some time later
Plenty of social roles are still not determined by market whims. Such as friendship and family relations.
John Stuart Mill noted that liberalism leaves the determination of social roles to individuals because the end result drives more progress than the alternatives.
> Sterile precarity is the problem, not the solution.
What to do instead? Non-sterile precarity as in feudalism?
It was in a self help psychology book that I thought communicated the core idea of meaning and purpose the best: Meaning == Feeling
The author (I believe of: running on empty) made the statement that a struggle to find purpose is the same thing as a struggle to feel and that life's purpose is to feel. Feelings are the fuel for our lives. So those with blunted emotions obviously feel no sense of purpose because the purpose of life is to feel emotions.
Struggling with a lack of meaning is the same thing as struggling to feel. If you knew what would make you feel, it would obviously be meaningful to interact with that.
Bringing this idea back to Frankl, his work becomes much more accessible: The purpose of life is to live every moment with feeling. Finding meaning means seeing what makes you feel.
> a struggle to find purpose is the same thing as a struggle to feel
I think feeling is a means to an end, and that there are deeper reasons for a lack of purpose:
- Loss (eg after death of loved ones, or of abilities)
- Change (eg of the shape of a relationship) that is hard to adapt to
- Inability to end current adversity (eg emotional pain that can’t be stopped due to circumstances)
For those, people find “workarounds” that numb their feelings (drugs, workaholism, constant distractions etc) so they don’t have to feel the emotional pain (which they currently have no real fix for) all the time. The search for a purpose is IMO a search for anything that resolves the emotional pain. As soon as the pain is gone, “feeling” is safe again and no longer has to be suppressed.
I was reading it hoping for an algorithm to find any meaning at all.
For you "meaning" seems to mean something. For me "meaning" was a null pointer exception. The variable name "meaning" is understood in a general sense, but when you try to manipulate the idea or collide it with other ideas, everything breaks down. If you can't de-reference "meaning" then Frankl's work is quite opaque since "meaning" is primarily a feeling and most people's understanding of it is intuitive rather than prescriptive. Frankl is never able to jump out of the intuitive understanding of meaning, and so for someone who the idea of "meaning" is not intuitive his work was quite inaccessible.
Once you understand that meaning is feeling, then you can think about meaning in a more prescriptive sense and his work starts to make more sense. I would probably have a wildly different experiencing reading it now than when I originally read it.
I had a childhood where my feelings did not matter very much. My dad was a narcissist and my mom was too busy bread-winning. This resulted in suppression of emotions since they had very little value. As an adult the lessons learned as a child are carried through.
Childhood emotional neglect is the state of not learning how to have purpose because you don't matter. The depression stage of grief seems closer to the state of having lost meaning.
I guess for a summarized critique of Frankl, it's that much like the article posted is saying, meaning is not a linear monolothic idea. If you frame the conversation around meaning as Frankl's book does, that's a very different conversation than one framed around emotional regulation. The emotional regulation conversation helps find meaning, but the meaning conversation is unlikely to help a person with emotional regulation.
If I feel content while doing something, then that something gives me meaning.
Have you found ways to overcome or manage the effects of that neglect?
> The emotional regulation conversation helps find meaning, but the meaning conversation is unlikely to help a person with emotional regulation.
I guess you meant "[...] to help a person _without_ emotional regulation"?
Can you expand on this? Are you suggesting the lack of emotional regulation is what prevents people from finding meaning (whatever that means)?
No, but I haven't tried professionals or medication. I watched a number of Stanford lectures on psychiatry and while I was rabidly against medications (unless they had a street value because that indicates they do something that people value), I found the lectures pretty convincing and they changed my mind. Sapolsky in particular has some great lectures.
> emotional regulation
That's a fun bit of ambiguity. Am I saying help a [person with emotional regulation] or help a [person] with [emotional regulation]? I meant help a person regulate their emotions.
Running on empty talks about it. I can't say I am sold on her treatment protocol which involves work including writing reflections focused on bringing attention to emotions and being able to better describe them.
But yeah, blunted emotions and dis-regulation inhibit the ability to do work. It creates comfort seeking behavior rather than growth seeking behavior. If you can't imagine emotional payoff, how are you going to motivate work? Not work like a job, but work like learning to read sheet music, or put yourself in social situations where you might face rejection.
I think the authors core idea was that emotional neglect as a child creates a situation were you de-value your emotions (because you don't want to burden a parent with them, for example), which creates suppression and blunting of emotions, which then manifests in all types of mal-adaptions which ultimately creates a situation where the fuel for life, emotions, isn't there and then you feel like you are "running on empty."
The author explicitly states that emotions are that fuel. Emotions are what prevents a person from feeling like they are out of fuel.
I think there is a class of people for which they are looking for "fuel" to their life, and I think that is the same thing as looking for "meaning."
> Are you suggesting the lack of emotional regulation is what prevents people from finding meaning (whatever that means)?
So taking the idea that meaning is emotions, lack of emotional regulation makes it hard to feel the feelings you want, which is nearly tautological.
So the question becomes "Do I have trouble finding meaning because I have suppressed my emotions?" I certainly figured out quite young that it's easier to stop wanting something than to seek it out and struggle or fail, particularly without help. Do I really not want the thing, or was my desire suppressed? Would there be meaning in me getting it? Would there be meaning in seeking it out? Even if I suppressed my desires, is that desire still there? Have I suppressed my desire for meaning because the work is onerous?
I am not sure if those are the right questions or what the answers are but I think they poke in the emotional regulation/work/meaning/emotions direction and start sketching a framework upon which to think about the problem.
I recommend her book. I thought it was going to be a slog, but 1-2 chapters in and I felt like I was reading my own biography, I read it in a day. It's pretty mechanical rather than wishy-washy. Most concepts are well defined and technical in nature. She doesn't make many appeals to intuition and everything is pretty "cause and effect".
This usually only means that doctors restrict access to those drugs because they have a potential for addiction and abuse, and people seek them out on the street once they're addicted and their doctor has recognized this/declined to continue them on it/they want an abusable quantity. Exceptions for things like insulin which has other unique reasons.
Potential for abuse and addiction is not a good sign of value. It's a sign of it's potential to ruin or end your life.
All the anti-depressants come with a warning label that says may end your life, yet they have no street value and I've never heard them referred to as addictive (although they seem to have withdrawal).
Ketamine, mushrooms, LSD, etc. have street value and you hear way more "mushrooms helped my depression/ketamine is like a light-switch for depression" on the internet than you ever hear positive stories about SSRI's and the like which is more likely to have stories around sexual dysfunction or withdrawal syndrome than glowing reviews. Nobody says psychedelics are addictive.
Street value represents demand and lack of street value represents lack of demand and lack of demand represents lack of effect.
So I think the idea that potential for abuse is what drives street value is wrong, wrong in the sense that there is an element of truth, but it isn't the truth.
I think that reasoning is sound.
I think there is a fine dunning kruger line to be walked here and as I admitted (in the context of what you quoted) that I think there is truth to what I just wrote, but I don't think it is the truth.
Self reports of extreme efficacy on the internet happen for things like homeopathic medicine and isn't really evidence. I am aware of studies that do show efficacy for these though.
Psychedelics aren't addictive but they cause severe impairment which is dangerous. Also they're fun which the DEA hates.
As I said, it isn't just abuse. It's also addiction and danger and fun police.
Disclaimer: I'm pro legalizing everything
No it’s the same for me. The thing is that I don’t care at all about that when I’m well. I haven’t thought about the meaning of life for a year probably (ok I’m very busy). When I was in a bad place (also was raised by narcissists), I obsessed over meaning and purpose all the time. But that’s just a symptom of depression IMO. Like I said, my take is that the search for purpose is a proxy for concrete problems that need solving. Something that the conscious part comes up with that feels like finding a solution to would make us feel better.
Emotions are fleeting, ephemeral, things that should definitely not be used to drive our lives. You can have 10 different, conflicting, feelings in 5 minutes (and for some of us this is a common occurrence).
Meditation allowed me to get past my random thoughts and emotions and achieve some semblance of coherence to my inner life. Detaching from my emotions has done more for me achieving any meaning in my life than following them.
Defining my values and using them to guide my life has created meaning for me. YMMV
This is not obvious to me at all. I would expect trouble clearly feeling emotion to directly lead to struggle with meaning.
I am pretty sure this psychologist would agree: https://drjonicewebb.com/do-you-have-alexithymia/
Her book running on empty quite literally states that alexythemia is damaging to a feeling of purpose. She states alexythemia directly contributes to (1) emptiness and numbness, (2) suffering in silence, (3) questioning the meaning and value of your own life, and (4) escape fantasies.
I also ended up with a drug problem because I tried drugs at this time and it was the only way I could feel anything and make choices.
I went through clinical depression and solved that partly through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) [0], which has "The Happiness Trap" as its core text. The core idea of this (as you'd expect from the title) is that pursuing happiness as a goal is pointless and futile. ACT emphasises values over feelings as the core of meaning, and distancing oneself from one's feelings as a way to deal with them. There's considerable overlap with stoicism, which also de-emphasises feelings as a source of meaning (or anything). Both of these treat emotions as things to be treated carefully, as a probable source of misery and dis-ease, and not something to be embraced as one's core path to meaning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther...
"Emotions is meaning" is not "happiness is meaning", but that "feeling is meaning". I imagine that the acceptance in ACT involves allowing oneself to feel the feelings and understand them. I think Dr Jonice places most of her focus on this.
She makes it clear that feelings do not directly imply action, but that feelings imply relationship to a need, so understanding an emotion through the context of your needs helps inform the right action for the emotion.
She says neglect means your parents never helped you understand the relationship between emotions, meaning, and actions or never treated your emotions as valid and meaningful in the first place, resulting in suppression (she doesn't use the term experiential avoidance, but it sounds like the same idea).
> The core conception of ACT is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and resulting psychological rigidity that leads to a failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with core values.
It says it right here and this is consistent with her works. I think she would define "not emotions" or "not feeling" as experiential avoidance.
I imagine the approaches and techniques both schools would exercise are probably similar.
Honestly, reading what you wrote, without any real context of who you are or how you think, it sounds like you might still be experientially avoidant. I don't understand the difference between stoicism and experiential avoidance. "distancing" seems much different than "accepting," "embracing," or "treating as valid." But maybe words like distance mean different things to each of us.
I also am a total layman here, so I am probably ignorant.
I am not sure how a person would have values without emotions. I would expect values to be a product of emotions.
I agree with you that I see a lot of people using stoicism as experiential avoidance, but there is a difference between experiential avoidance and healthy stoicism.
Healthy stoicism recognizes that many (perhaps even most) unpleasant experiences are quite survivable and that feeling poorly is no inherent reason to panic.
To use an example with physical 'emotions': Stoicism recognizes that standing outside without a jacket in the mid 50s (F) might be uncomfortable but that's it. You're not going to die. You're not going to have any lasting damage. You just have to deal with being uncomfortable. Another example is that I have MS and find standing in one place to be quite uncomfortable but it doesn't cause any permanent harm - therefore instead of freaking out when I'm uncomfortable the answer is to ask myself 'do I want/need whatever thing I'm in line for?' and if the answer is 'yes' then I'm going to experience some discomfort and that's okay because humans have evolved over millions of years to experience some discomfort and as long as the discomfort stays at the 'not dangerous' level it's fine. Keep an eye on it but proceed.
It's also in being able to practice this skill so you can tell the difference between discomfort (warning) and acute danger signals. The more familiar you are with your body's reactions to chill, the easier it is for you to sense when that danger line is crossed and frostbite might set in or your body temperature is dropping perilously. The more I practice being uncomfortable, the more I can tell the difference between 'this thing is harder for me than an able-bodied person but I can do it if necessary' and 'this is not right/something is wrong and I need to disengage'.
> I am not sure how a person would have values without emotions.
Social values can be managed in my experience, but personal ones are hard. I had a very firm idea of what the social contract should look like (so like me with no emotions still followed the rules of the road and returned my carts to the corral) but next to zero personal direction. So I had the value that education is important and a society with an educated populace functions better, but no ability to decide what I should learn next. Emotions help you add nuance to your values so they're something other than principles that you get angry when other people transgress.
In my case, I needed to be more in touch with my emotions because I have severe dissociative issues and a very adversarial relationship with my own body, but I don't seek out any particular emotion. I see my emotions as data being passed to me from my lizard brain and I believe that to make appropriate decisions I must pay attention to all relevant data. In the same way that when planning an outing I must consider my physical capacity, when planning a goal or project I must also consider my emotional data. I try not to ascribe meaning to the emotions themselves, but I view them as invaluable indicators of meaning. If that makes any sense.
What about late stage cancer patients. They do feel pain. Does this mean, they find it meaningful to suffer till they die?
Or a mother that lost her only child, feeling now only misery?
So I would rephrase that to:
Finding meaning means doing what feels right.
So yes, in your specific case it meant, allowing yourself to feel again at all, to understand what you want to do.
I hope you manage.
If the self stayed unchanged, people won't even be able to develop through their lives, which is demonstrably not so.
So, with the "self", changes the idea of a meaning of life that appeals to that "self".
There is no purpose of life. Life is THE purpose. To experience its full brilliance is the ONLY purpose. And only way to experience that is through a healthy mind and healthy body. So do what you can to take care of those.
It seems that many people could enjoy a rich life, but instead they are thinking about that box all the time.
> Time is not fungible – a given moment of opportunity, or a chance to respond appropriately to a crisis, might not occur again ... The need to regulate our time into a continuous flow is the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It is something we do to serve economies of scale in which we are interchangeable parts. But meaning, creative power and fortune arrive on their own schedules, and imagining that you can or should devote every waking moment to something is absurd ..
> the non-linear approach is .. more adaptive to the realities of power laws – of moments of high payoff or high risk - than of the day to day grind of accrual. If our lives are rich in opportunities for meaning, rather than defined by a singular narrative arc, we can act decisively at particularly important moments rather than imagining that every moment is equally meaningful ..
> Your children need to be fed, clothed and educated, and they need your love and guidance – but they also need to see you happy and engaged with life .. When you are honestly pursuing your own values and vision – and not subordinating them – you are more likely to generate meaning than if you are navigating a maze of compromises with some ultimate goal in mind ..
> The heroes whose lives inspired you did what they did mostly by going out into the unknown and doing what others thought was impossible. This is not, incidentally, a guarantee that if you do so you will succeed – for the world we live in to be a meaningful one, there must be uncertainty and risk.
If you can “convince yourself” (ie. actually feel), that this moment right now is the most meaningful moment of your life
And you can do that consistently, in the moment
You are there
And the weird thing is that to get there, we need to let go, not do more or make an effort, but relax into it
But also there are thousands of different methods and descriptions. Some of them thousands of years old
This is a basic human condition and ability
We just don’t practice it or teach it enough
For me, the awareness of presence lies somewhere close to the awareness of something making no sense
It feels sort of like the intersection between pure feeling and thinking
I think that’s why in Zen they use koans, to get us to short-circuit our thoughts and gain awareness of the feeling of paradox
> Joe: We never found out what 22's purpose was.
> Jerry: Excuse me? Joe: You know, her spark. Her purpose. Was it music? Biology? Walking?
> Jerry: We don't assign purposes. Where did you get that idea?
> Joe: Because I have piano. It's what I was born to do. That's my spark.
> Jerry: A spark isn't a soul's purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions. Your "purposes." Your "meanings of life." So basic.
Off topic, but I really like the author’s use of Substack and I just subscribed to their channel. For 30+ years I manually edited HTML for my web site and just a week ago switched my personal domain [1] to Substack (copying over 2000+ old blog articles) and so far I really love the platform even though I am just learning to use it.
It's bleak in a way, but at the same time it can be comforting in the sense that everything is exactly the only way that it could be. You can not be anyone other than who you are. You are exactly as time and space prepositioned you to be.
1) the current probability of determinism / no free will is 'very highly probable.'
2) the probability of determinism being the case rises every time our knowledge about the universe increases
3) The statements above are gaining more and more consensus among scientists.
And I am definitely agnostic on the q, but weighted on the side of determinism.
But - Surely the quantum world utterly undermines the above until we know more about it. Perhaps we could be harnessing free will somehow, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
When reasoning about individual atoms, the universe may well be deterministic, but the complexity of a human organism is so large (in comparison to the level of understanding it exhibits), that something very interesting may emerge, which you can thoroughly enjoy.
Even if freedom of choice is a big illusion, it is still a really big illusion, and you are more than likely totally unable to predict most of your life.
Assuming you are a bit scared of determinism, what would it mean practically? What would it help you with? Possibly not much. And how would it limit you? If you'd imply that life then has no meaning, and if that feels uncomfortable, I'd suggest to change your definition of "meaning".
Another way to interpret this is that all logically possible worlds truly exist, and you're (necessarily) experiencing an arbitrary one of those.
> I think, therefore I am
as a starting point.
I would ask them, "whose language are you using to make that statement?"
and I feel that would set the proper frame for answering the question of a life's purpose.
That is an absolutely brilliant question, it casts substantial doubt on the notion that one's own consciousness is all one can know exists.
https://www.philosophybro.com/archive/descartes-meditations-...
Working towards few simple goals is enough to live a good life probably. Having a purpose now sounds like I am an object made to do something specific. I am not. I only need to live a good life.
I don't need to believe I have some pre-ordained mission or grand vision for my life. I'm ok with the fact that I am one in 7 billion, insignificant to most, but significant to my wife and my family.
Pursuing goals is a great feeling and so generally I do my best to optimize my life around performing well in body and mind. Control what you can, have peace with what you cannot, and cultivate the wisdom to know the difference.
You first need to love yourself, then you can grow to love - and nurture - everyone you can.
It follows that knowing of your own eventual annihilation must be terrifying. Sure you can take refuge in false delusions or just ignore it. But if you're not afraid of death, are you really living? Are you really respecting life properly when you're not terrified to lose it?
That said, I love life and I wish I had a thousand more to live and choose different paths. It’s like a game where I’ll only ever play one character. I’m not keen to die, but I hope I’ll face it with grace and courage when the time comes.
It's closer to a certainty than a possibility.
Yep, it didn't bother me for ~eternity before I existed. I think it'll be the same after.
Approaching death does scare me though. I thought Christopher Hitchens captured that feeling well:
"It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise."
I was lucky to meet and marry a wonderful person that helped me push through all the obstacles I imagined were between me and all those things (I mention them because I would never have done all I did without their presence), and I started doing all the things I would've missed if I were dead.
Being around 30 now, I've done so much more than most people I've met, and than I imagine I would in a lifetime when I was 20, that I feel comfortable with my life. I know that I have not wasted my time, and I'm proud of all I've done and am still doing.
Things like aneurysms and car accidents happen to everyone, and I don't fool myself - I could die in 15 minutes slipping out of the bath - but I'm fine with myself, at this point at least.
(I'm sorry this is probably not very interesting, I'm letting myself ramble a little.)
It's not always easy to feel lucky like that, but it ought to be. A bigger question is: why don't we all feel lucky to have been alive, every moment of the day? In any situation of life and any circumstance, isn't it awe-inspiring that we're experience this slice of life in an uncaring universe? That we're being and not un-being? But for most of us 99.999% of the time we don't feel that way.
Of course, you're still free to feel lucky being alive. But it’s an irrational feeling. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)
When you understand that, the only thing left is to live your life in a way you feel the most happy/satisfied/fulfilled. To reach nirvana or ευδαιμονία. There is no magic sauce for that, each of us finds their way to this through different paths.
you would think in this day you can get any code for anything you want, but many, many items have no implementation at all. or maybe some code is available, but its years old and abandoned. or maybe its just shitty code. or maybe its a huge bloated mess and you just want one simple thing. so, if you think you might have some skill, I would strongly suggest learning to program, we could really use the help.
thats not why I am doing it.
Programming was one of my interests too, but if someone offered to put £2M in to my bank account under condition I never wrote a single line of code again, well... I'd take it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I could find another "passion" in the 20 years of my own life that that would buy me. Hell, if i didn't have to work, I bet I could find a half dozen passions.
I think I could find other passions, but none of them seem as boundless and fungible (pursuable with nothing but a computer) or as productive (I can make stuff happen!) as programming.
Money isn't something I'm suffering for want of. But I would suffer for want of something like programming. It's the coolest thing in life, and now I can't do it anymore since I got all this money? Not a good trade. I didn't get into it for the money to begin with. :p
I'm reminded of a passage in Existentialism is a humanism where he posits that objects, like tables or tree, have innate purpose by their design being made for a task (yeah - more complex than that for natural things like trees but you get the gist), while humans simply are not born with innate purpose, as they have intent and can act upon themselves instead of comforming to the world.
While this might seem uncomfortable, this is to be seen as a gift - you are free of purpose, and therefore are to decide for yourself why to live. After all, while a table has it's rightful place, it also confines it.
And Camus famousky said that the only serious philosophical question is that of suicide - and I think that it's the only place to start when thinking about the rest of your life.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqR7AbhVQAAuuvA.jpg
celebrities who get attention for mental illness ignores all the ordinary people with mental illness who get no such coverage